@WeAreTheDead: Remembering Private Henry Rohloff

The war was not over, but nearly won by the time Private Henry Rohloff’s short life ended far from the front lines of Europe.

Allied troops were advancing on Berlin from the west. The Russians were closing on the outskirts to the east.

Adolf Hitler, holed up in an underground bunker, would live only another nine days.

The Luftawaffe’s bombing and rocket attacks on England had ceased by April 21, 1945, when Pte. Rohloff walked through what should have been the safe civilian streets in the Staines district of Middlesex.

Six years earlier, Rohloff had dropped out of school to find work in Manitoba. His father, Gottlieb, had established a family farm near Golden Bay but died of cancer at a young age. His mother remarried, leaving Rohloff with a large mixed family of 13 brothers and sisters.

He was out of school at 14 and shortly after that he went out to work as there was not much farming to do. The army called then and this was it.
— Eddie Rohloff, brother

Rohloff ended up in England with the Canadian Provost Corps, which functioned as the army’s military police during the Second World War. Through much of the war, his unit, 6 Company, was assigned to provost duties at the Canadian Military Headquarters in London, working out of a former hospital at Covent Garden.

But 6 Company were also deployed to other cities around England and Scotland, to police the thousands of off-duty Canadian soldiers, according to Watchdog: A History of the Canadian Provost Corps, by former Provost Marshal Andrew R. Ritchie.

It was likely in this role that Rohloff was in Middlesex that Saturday evening, walking home in his hob-nailled army boots. Rohloff stepped on the power supply for a street car, and was electrocuted, his brother said.

He warned his partner not to step on it and he himself stepped on it.

He was 21 years old, the only one of four Rohloff brothers who went to war and didn’t return.

Rohloff was buried at Brookwood Military Cemetry in Surrey, along with several other members of the “C Pro C” provost corps.

Rohloff’s brief life and its sudden end left little trace on the public record.

But his name was selected at random from a database of more than 119,000 Canadian military deaths and posted on Twitter on Tuesday morning at 11:11 by the account @WeAreTheDead, an online memorial created by the Citizen.

Each hour of every day, @WeAreTheDead selects a name from a database the Ottawa Citizen obtained from Veterans Affairs through the Access to Information Act.

It details more than 119,000 Canadians who died in service of the country, including those killed in the two World Wars, the Korean War, Afghanistan and on peacekeeping or peace-time duties.

The Twitter account began tweeting in November 2011 and will take more another nine years to recite the entire list of Canadian military deaths, ending sometime in June 2023, depending on how many more names are added to the list before then.